Critical Thinking in a Crazy World

It’s hard to know what to believe anymore.

Inundated as the average person is today with over 30 gigabytes! of daily information, the truth is harder to come by than the proverbial needle in a haystack.

In 2016, Oxford Dictionaries selected “post-truth” as the word of the year, defining it as “relating to circumstances in which facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than are appeals to emotion and personal belief.”

According to a Pew Research Center study conducted just after the 2016 election, 64% of adults believed fake news stories cause a great deal of confusion and close to 25% said they had shared fabricated political stories themselves — sometimes by mistake and sometimes intentionally.

If we adults have a hard time separating fact from fiction and a harder time checking our emotions and impulses when consuming media, just imagine how harder it is for young kids. Sadly, the future will only get worse according to more than half of media experts interviewed in 2017 by BBC Future Now. The reasons, they said, are twofold:

First, the fake news ecosystem preys on some of our deepest instincts. Humans’ primal quest for success, power, and belonging (our survival instinct) will continue to degrade the online information environment. Manipulative actors will use new…